Radios such as hand-held two-way radios are utilized within a variety of public safety environments, such as law enforcement, fire rescue, and emergency medical environments to name a few. Currently, public safety personnel working in the field use portable radios for monitoring communications from one or more channels. In such portable radios, when the user presses a push to talk (PTT) switch to respond to any of the channels, all incoming communications are lost. This is also true for radios that are operated to monitor communications on one particular channel at a time. Specifically, this limits the interoperability of portable radios where users are not able to listen to the monitored channels while the radio is operating in transmission mode. In public safety environments, it is possible that an incident commander may miss critical information being transmitted on one or more of the monitored channels when the radio has switched to transmission mode.
Accordingly, there is a need for improving the interoperability of portable radios used in public safety environments.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of embodiments of the present disclosure.
The apparatus components have been represented where appropriate by conventional symbols in the drawings, showing only those specific details that are pertinent to understanding the embodiments of the present disclosure so as not to obscure the disclosure with details that will be readily apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art having the benefit of the description herein.